Su Yunsheng, the man pushing China's sustainable development

Professor Su Yunsheng is busy. During the course of our hour-long conversation, he has to answer half a dozen phone calls and deal with at least five pressing queries from his staff. That he’s forced to multitask in this way is no surprise. After all, his business card -- slim, black, and hiply asymmetrical -- lists no less than four job titles.

Jack of four trades

Su Yunsheng is Deputy General Engineer at the Tongji Urban Planning Institute where he lectures at least once a week, Curator of the Expo Theme Pavilion and the China Pavilion Online (having previously led the team that submitted the winning Expo Master Plan bid), Co-founder of ‘Urban China magazine, and now also President of Etopia, a year-old company specializing in sustainable construction. He’s also barely forty.

It’s Etopia which now takes up most of his time. “We started it after the Sichuan earthquake,” he explains. “Before that we’d only been doing research into sustainability and integrated buildings. But when the earthquake hit we realized we couldn’t wait any longer. We had to put things into practice.”

Men of steel

What he put together was a one-stop service team made up of the finest young minds at Tongji -- “The best from each field.” Not just urban planners but architects, designers, and materials experts, they’d built their first house in Dujiangyan, the town closest to the epicenter of the quake, within a month.

Before that we’d only been doing research into sustainability and integrated buildings. But when the Sichuan earthquake hit we realized we couldn’t wait any longer. We had to put things into practice.— Su Yunsheng

The idea was to showcase the advantages of what Etopia describes as “intelligent sustainable structures,” made either of steel, wood or loam. Not only can these buildings be assembled astonishingly fast, but their constituent parts can be flat-packed and mailed to where they’re needed.

Nor are these houses only for emergencies -- in a promotional video, prospective buyers are shown designing their house online, choosing designs, components and color schemes with one simple click, the same way you can now do when you buy a car. Only after the video is over does Su Yunsheng point out that we’ve been sitting inside one of these click-to-assemble rooms all along.

Shining Points

Etopia’s work draws on many of the themes that Su Yunsheng and his colleagues pushed for the Expo, particularly the notion that “sustainability cannot be just about the ‘shining points,’ the highest-profile projects,” but must be something the mass market can get behind. “All of us need to take responsibility for the future,” he says.

To that extent, although Etopia is a private company, they’re doing consciousness-raising work that elsewhere in the world would typically be done by NGOs. And word is starting to spread -- Su Yunsheng himself has been to Zambia to consult on plans for a new city near Lusaka.

Closer to home, Su Yunsheng is optimistic about the future of sustainable building. “Chinese people like change,” he says. “They like something new. So the question is how can we keep changing, but also be sustainable.” He admits that construction costs are still expensive by local standards, that there are too many un-integrated standards across the country, and too much of a focus on the initial costs of building, not the long-term savings, but he is encouraged by the efforts the government has already made. These efforts are, in part, because Su Yunsheng and his team are showing that sustainability is viable.

“People know now that going green is not only a responsibility,” Su Yunsheng says, reaching for the cellphone buzzing on the table, “but that in the long-term it can make money, too.”